Abstract

This
paper
deals with the perspective of interpretation theory or hermeneutics of
the process of information storage and retrieval as it was conceived in
the early eighties. Further developments in the information technology
as well as a broad international discussion on the hermeneutic paradigm
in the information field were added to the original paper from 1986.
The
main thesis concerns not only the interpretative nature of
information-seeking
processes but also the role of interpretation with regard to the
fragmentation
of knowledge. Information is the shape of knowledge at the end of
modernity.
On the basis of the existential turn of interpretation theory the role
of pre-understanding is stressed not only with regard to the
information
retrieval processes but also to the specific worldly situation in which
the inquirers are embedded.

FOREWORD

The
origin
of this paper goes back to the International Conference "Phenomenology
and Technology" held at the Philosophy and Technology Studies Center,
Polytechnic
University (New York), October 2-4, 1986 which was organized by
Wolfgang
Schirmacher and Carl Mitcham. After thirteen years, obviously, things
have
changed and I have done some further work too.

The
present text is an enriched version of the original one. I have
added
some later insights without changing the basic ideas which I still
think
are valuable and can also be of help when reflecting, for instance,
about
the nature of communicating and searching for information in the
Internet.

INTRODUCTION

In
the editorial preface to Philosophy and Technology II: Information
Technology
and Computers in Theory and Practice, Cohen and Wartofsky consider
two questions to be at the heart of philosophical thinking about modern
information technology: What is information? and What is the relation
between
computerized information processing and human reasoning? They
also
point to a third issue — one which in my opinion is central and
underlies
the other two — namely, the interaction between society and information
systems (1).

My
contribution to the first question is a tentative proposal utilizing
recent
discussions of the concept of "modernity." I take a restrictive view of
the second question by analyzing the hermeneutical components of the
interaction
between an inquirer or user and data bases. With regard to the last
issue,
I contrast the whole field of the technological instrumentation of
information
with a non-instrumental but at the same time highly productive view of
human language. I will argue that the hermeneutical dimension of
language allows not only a critical view of what I call the
"information
Ge-stell," but also gives us some hints about fundamental
potentialities
of language which remain hidden when the information phenomenon blinds
our eyes.

INFORMATION AND MODERNITY

What
is
information? Information is the shape of knowledge at the end of
modernity.
Some characteristics of the end of modernity are: (a) abandonment of
the
primacy of rational or scientific thought as qualitatively superior to
all other types of discourse; (b) abandonment of the idea of human
subjectivity
as opposed to objectivity, in which intersubjectivity and contextuality
play only minor roles; and (c) abandonment of the (Platonic) idea of
human
knowledge as something separate from the knower.

All
these positions, especially the third, were core discoveries of
Husserl.
They are also fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon of
information,
so that information can be described as the shape of knowledge at the
end
of modernity.

First,
with regard to the abandonment of the primacy of scientific
rationality,
information is admitted to be fragmentary, to come in pieces. The fragmentation
is two-fold: in reducing knowledge to pieces, the original
contextuality
disappears or becomes tacit. Knowledge becomes, literally, partial,
dependent
on prejudices or on the knower's frame of reference. This relativity of
knowledge to a changing horizon of interpretation also brings to the
fore
of epistemology a new category: that of truth as now, at the end of
modernity,
inseparable from that of relevance.

Second,
with regard to the abandonment of the subjectivity-objectivity
opposition,
information is described as having a certain commonality.
Information
is something basically human which should be in principle accessible to
everyone. Modern knowledge is something common, shared by a community,
for instance by a scientific community.

Third,
with regard to the abandonment of the idea that knowledge is something
separate from the knower, there is the notion of mediation.
Modern
information technology disseminates all kinds of knowledge all the time
to everyone in a way prefigured by printing. Information becomes part
and
parcel of media, becomes a medium.

In
sum, the characteristics of fragmentation, commonality, and mediation
point
toward the nature of information, its present shape at the end of
modernity.

THE HERMENEUTICAL PROCESS OF INFORMATION STORAGE AND
RETRIEVAL

In
setting
up for example a bibliographic database, the fragmentation of
information
forces us to create the conditions of possibility for the retrieval of
the pieces because their common context remains tacit. The
partialization
opens the possibility for different perspectives of
interpretation.

This
situation can be described in terms similar to those used by Heidegger
to analyze the structure of understanding: the general conceptual
background
(Vorhabe), the specific viewpoint (Vorsicht), and the
corresponding
terminology (Vorgriff). In the same way, a database creator must
pre-define the field of knowledge, which is usually dealt with via a
classification
scheme. The terminology of the field is objectivized in a thesaurus.
Bibliographic
description, abstract, index terms (or descriptors), and classification
codes are the document surrogates which can be searched for taking into
account the objectivized pre-understanding (thesaurus, classification
scheme,
etc.) of a user community. Once the database is implemented in the
system,
we have on the one side the objectivized pre-understanding and on the
other
the interpreter or inquirer.

According
to existential hermeneutics, a human being is not an isolated inquirer
trying to reach others or the outside world from his or her
encapsulated
mind/brain, but is already sharing the world with others. Within this
world
of open possibilities a person meets others and shares things and
concerns,
developing in its variety and complexity what Hannah Arendt calls the
"web
of human relationships" (Arendt 1970, pp. 183-184). With the fixing of
a part of the community background in some database the inquirer or
searcher
can match his or her questions against it. Here Gadamer's "fusion of
horizons"
(Gadamer 1975) describes not only the situation of text interpretation
in general but also and even more accurately the dynamic process
occurring
during online dialog.

We
can consider the process of storage and retrieval of information
hermeneutically
as the articulation of the relationship between the existential
world-openness
of the inquirer, his/her different open and socially shared horizons of
pre-understanding and the established horizon of the system. The
information-seeking
process is basically an interpretation process having to do with the
(life-)context
and the background of the inquirer and with that of the people who
store
different kinds of linguistic expressions having a meaning within fixed
contexts of understanding such as: thesauri, key words and
classification
schemes.

With
the statedness of a part of a community background in a system, the
inquirer
can match his/her questions and backgrounds of pre-understanding
against
it. The online-dialogue is a specific form of the hermeneutic circle.
In contrast to a vicious circle, the concept of hermeneutic
circle
refers to the process of understanding as a dynamic process of fusion
of horizons (Gadamer) in which statements are considered as answers
to questions. Questions arise within a pre-understanding which is
itself
the result of having asked questions, and so on. Thus the dynamic of
the
interpretation process has its roots in a Socratic attitude of
questioning.
This attitude is existentially grounded in the fact that we are
embedded
in an already structured world (historical situation, culture, language
and so on), being confronted at the same time with an open field of
possibilites,
i.e. with an open frame or a horizon.

The
inquirer's pre-understanding is embedded in a community's
pre-understanding,
which is itself part of the web of interrelations of things or concerns
that in their openness and finitude arise within the shared
world-openness
itself. If we call this world openness Pre-Understanding (PU)
as
the ontological condition of possibility for the ontic pre-understandings
(pu), then the basic difference stated by this theory is that PU cannot
be reduced to (open or fixed) pu which is what mentalism in fact
postulates.
The distinction between PU and pu does not preclude of course the
possibility
of integrating dynamic learning patterns into retrieval systems
(Doszkocs/Reggia/Lin
1990).

This
can be depicted schematically in the following diagram:

INQUIRER <=> SYSTEM

"fusion
of horizons"

hermeneutic
circle

open
pre-understandings (pu)

world-openness
(PU)

objectivized
pre-understandings

classifications,
thesauri etc.

Some
consequences with regard to the understanding and design of information
systems are:

In
setting
up, say, a bibliographic database, the fragmentation of information
forces
us to create the conditions of possibility for the retrieval of the
pieces.
We need conceptual backgrounds, for instance the scope of a data base,
specific viewpoints (classification schemes), and a terminology. The
result
is an objectivized or fixed pre-understanding. These backgrounds belong
to historical, cultural, linguistic... situations. There is no knowledge
in itself.

Users
are not isolated minds with cognitive structures, but are bodily human
beings sharing a theoretical and practical pre-understanding with, for
instance, professional communities. The are no users in general.

The
question
of relevance relates to the various horizons of pre-understanding. The
hermeneutical paradigm offers a framework for the foundation of various
relevance criteria such as systems relevance and individual relevance
or
pertinence (Lancaster 1979, Salton/McGill 1983). In fact, this
distinction
is not enough. According to Froehlich (Froehlich 1994), hermeneutics
can
provide a more productive framework for modelling systems and user
criteria.
This framework should include a hermeneutic of users, of the
information
collection, and of the mediation through the system. This is in
accordance
with what I proposed in my book Hermeneutik
der Fachinformation (Capurro 1986).

Information
systems are embedded in various cultural contexts. The study of
information
processes includes rhetorical, ethical and political questions.
Information
science can be conceived as a rhetorical discipline (Capurro 1991).
Information
scientists like N.J. Belkin, R.N. Oddy, H.M. Brooks and P. Ingwersen
(Ingwersen
1992), have developed a cognitive paradigm that conceives the
information
retrieval process as an interpretation process, where the requester's
knowledge
structures actively interact with the system (Capurro 1985, Allen
1991).
Frohmann (Frohmann 1990 and 1992) and Blair (Blair 1990) have made
various
objections to this paradigm. Existential hermeneutics can also provide
an antidote to mentalism in information science.

I
agree
with Swanson's postulate on the "future of an illusion" when he
states:

"An
information need cannot be fully expressed as a search request that is
independent of innumerable presuppositions of context - context that
itself
is impossible to describe fully, for it includes among other things the
requester's own background of knowledge." (Swanson 1988)

It is,
of course, not only her/his background of knowledge that cannot be
described
fully, but the very fact of her/his being-in-the-world. What we
do when we retrieve information is, in fact, to interpret it not only
intellectually
but existentially. Information retrieval is, as Swanson remarks, a
misleading
metaphor. As Spark Jones (Spark Jones 1991) points out, the role of
artificial
intelligence in information retrieval will not be in the foreseeable
future
"to replace humans by machines" but to support various kinds of natural
language manipulation, operating only at the linguistic level, without
being based directly on "world knowledge" or, as we would say
hermeneutically,
without operating on its own existential basis.
"Information-as-process"
as well as "information-as-thing" (documents) are, in other words,
situational
(Buckland 1991, p. 50 and Cornelius 1996).

LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE AND THE INFORMATION GE-STELL

Information
technology can help us become more human if we make joint efforts to
investigate
its presuppositions in all their complexity. This historical reflection
in its philosophical dimensions is the task of hermeneutic
phenomenology.
Let me now try to illuminate this topic, reflecting on the
potentialities
of human logos.

According
to Heidegger, modern technology is double-edged: as a techne it
partakes of poesis and brings something forth into the open,
but
at the same time it crystallizes into the instrumental structure of the
Ge-stell (2). Instrumentality is good, provided it does
not degenerate
into a totalitarian or one-sided view. From this perspective, the
development
of information technology at the end of modernity is the creation of an
information Ge-stell. Whereas on the one hand we bring
forth linguistically
mediated knowledge in a new shape, on the other we transform language
into
a mere instrument.

Yet
even when this happens, as I have argued in the previous section, the
process
of interpretation is needed for the constitution of meaning. In fact,
written
as well as spoken logos never comes to an end, can never be
definitively
fixed once and for all. It conceals itself in its re-presentations.
Modern
subjectivity does not pay attention to this concealment while
transforming
the event of information, its weakness or dependence on interpretation,
into an information and/or knowledge establishment. In this way
it gives up its ethical responsibility, hoping to rest on a strong or
fixed
structure (Capurro 1996).

Nevertheless
the information Ge-stell is an opportunity for modernity to
recuperate
in one of its characteristic formations the hidden dimension of
language.
The information Ge-stell can become a voice within the
polyphonic
nature of human logos — if and only if it is interrelated to
the
whole range of its hidden potentialities. If it is not, then we will
have
no more than an information society. The key issue in today's knowledge
society is our relation to what we do not know in and through what we
believe
we know. To do this in a digital environment is one of the major
challenges
of today's networked environment, where the partiality of knowledge is
the strength of a decentralized, non-totalitarian and opaque structure
we call the Internet. What we get is not a fully enlightened or
transparent
society, but an opaque one, where the perspectives are continually
undermined
by chaos and creativity (Vattimo 1989 and Capurro 1995).